Archive folder is automatically added to your Office 365 mailbox

Summary

An Archive folder has automatically been added to your Office 365 mailbox. At the end of December 2016, Office 365 was updated to automatically create the Archive folder upon any access to the Exchange mailbox, initial or subsequent.

Known issues

Duplicate Archive1 folder

You may get the duplicate folder Archive1 in addition to the Archive folder. If newly archived email is being moved to the Archive1 folder, follow these steps in Outlook and Outlook on the Web:

Configure your email account to use Online Mode.

Click File, Account Settings, Account Settings... .

In the Account Settings dialog box, click your email account on the Email tab, and then click Change.

Click to clear the Use Cached Exchange Mode checkbox, click Next, and then click Finish.

Close and restart Outlook.

After Outlook restarts, move all content to the folder that is currently designated as the default archive folder. In this case, it is the Archive1 folder.

Archive folder in unexpected location

You may find your Archive folder in an unexpected location, for example, as a subfolder of Deleted Items. To move the Archive folder to the default location, follow these steps in Outlook on the Web:

Configure your email account to use Online Mode.

Click File, Account Settings, Account Settings... .

In the Account Settings dialog box, click your email account on the Email tab, and then click Change.

Click to clear the Use Cached Exchange Mode checkbox, click Next, and then click Finish.

Close and restart Outlook.

After Outlook restarts, backup the content of the folder currently designated as the default archive folder. You can do this by creating a new folder and moving the email from the Archive folder to the new folder, or by exporting the Archive folder contents to an Outlook Data File (.pst).

More Information

The One Click Archive feature was available on the web version of Outlook in Office 365 for more than a year before the Outlook 2016 user interface was updated to show the Archive button. If an Archive folder did not exist, clicking on the Archive button in Outlook 2016 would prompt you to create the Archive folder or select an existing folder as the target folder for One Click Archive. However, with the change documented here, the folder has since been created without a prompt or any other user interaction.